Boomfell — Douglas Hobbie

Everyone, it seems to Charles Boomfell, has moved on to another world of worries. His break with the past no sooner appears complete than the past recurs. Eliot Singer, his colleague - and betrayer - from seven years before, calls from Toronto needing to talk, "appealing to a loyalty and concern that their relationship hardly warranted" in Boomfell's view. Brilliant, controlling Singer, who had always "shrewdly and steadfastly careered ahead according to his own schedule of set goals," has lost his confidence, maybe more. His obsession with a young woman named Lucky has unhinged him, and Singer's invasion of the Boomfell world, by turns funny and wrenching, amounts to a one-man inquisition of middle-class life.

The advent of Singer provokes Boomfell to pursue another phantom from years before, a woman both he and Singer knew intimately, a quest that inevitably turns the seeker back on himself. While Boomfell remains caught up in the past, his enterprising wife, Val, ventures toward fresh possibilities through a new friend, April, a young woman whose presence here, in voice and vision, provides a telling counterpoint to Boomfell's disenchanted brooding and Singer's manic self-absorption.

Quick with energy and wit, Boomfell is a richly textured and deeply perceptive novel about marriage and passion, friendship and loss, the vanities of men and the enduring strengths of women. It articulates the cherished hopes, profound disappointments, and moral dilemmas of middle-class life in our times.